Reunion
by readerofasaph
Summary: Yagyuu and Niou meet for the first time in four years, and have a conversation over coffee.


"Would you even have said hello? If I hadn't said it first."

The cafe was quiet. The lunch crowd had dissipated nearly an hour ago, leaving small, metallic chairs subtly askew in relation to the linoleum tables, which sported trails of damp where the waitresses had hastily wiped them down – too hastily, Hiroshi assessed, noticing the grease-induced lustre at the peripheries of several tabletops.

Across from him, Niou was stirring sugar into his coffee without looking at table, Hiroshi, or even the coffee cup, to judge from the blank, distant expression in his irises. It was a familiar expression but a peculiar gesture; Hiroshi would have pegged Niou as the type to take his coffee black, although he'd never had the chance to test this assumption during junior high. (First and foremost, he'd have pegged Niou as the type not to drink coffee at all, a hypothesis he wasn't ready to let go of until the other man actually, physically, took a sip.)

Niou discarded the torn sugar packet and didn't drink. "That's a pretty direct question to ask."

"Perhaps you'd rather I engage in small talk, then, Niou-kun?"

"It'd be polite." He looked up; their eyes met. By the weight of that gaze Hiroshi was left fumbling for words to say. "It'd be logical."

Small talk is impossible with you, Hiroshi thought, small talk would imply my relegation to somewhere outside your universe, or else some change in _you_, that I would find equally devastating. It had been four years of not keeping in touch, four years of Hiroshi making an exception for Niou. Yukimura had received some e-mails, he knew that much; Niou would not refuse Yukimura. Renji would have kept track but not necessarily kept in correspondence.

Hiroshi, well --

"Yanagi told me you were doing materials engineering. I bet you're good at that."

It registered with Hiroshi that it was _Yanagi_ and not _our strategist_, before he said: "Not as good as you would be." Of the things he remembered about junior high, that one stuck out like a sore thumb especially: bleached and rat-tailed head bent over an exercise book of algebraic symbols, sprawling handwriting that was curiously neat in its own way, proofs skeletal and devastatingly simple, their conclusions reached when Hiroshi, carefully following the textbook example, was barely at the second step.

He could have said that he remembered everything about Niou-kun, except that would be false. He'd realised this thirty minutes ago when he saw the face in the park, now earringed on the left and framed by short black hair, watching grey swans drift on a miniature lake with an expression which had not changed at all between the ages of fifteen and nineteen but which Hiroshi had thoroughly forgotten. It'd awakened, and was awakening, in Hiroshi the recollection of sweat and endorphins: the memory, in his body, of duty, desire, competitive drive, all struggling for supremacy and driven madder by the dispassion of the partner standing behind him.

Where Hiroshi saw battle, Niou saw _goal_. Where Hiroshi felt the draw of proprieties, Niou only saw the things that made sense.

"Not at all." Niou leaned back in his chair. His legs stretched out, his sneakers brushing against Yagyuu's pants before moving to one side. "I don't have the passion to succeed at that."

"What are you doing these days?" The odds of Niou winning a scholarship to MIT, or dropping out of high school, had been roughly sixty-forty, four years ago, by Yanagi's estimate.

Niou gave him a speculative glance. "Whatever I want."

"And besides that?" Silly question; was Niou-kun capable of doing anything other than exactly what he wanted? Hiroshi recalled Nationals in third-year, the one they'd lost, and Kirihara asking (in a hushed voice, out of Niou's hearing, out of Yukimura's hearing, which really was a significant amount of tact for him back then) why Niou-sempai hadn't played his hardest; Marui, who'd been the only person psychologically fit to answer at the time, had replied, "He _did_ play his hardest. Don't waste your time worrying, brat, you wouldn't understand."

Hiroshi was still being watched, by dark, steady eyes that were as detached as ever, but also – he was annoyed by the relief that surged through his chest at this observation – curious. "You've lost your touch, Yagyuu. You used to be a lot pissier than this."

"As I recall, you used to go to a lot more effort, to provoke people."

"Well, I'm subtler now."

Yagyuu had not touched his own tea, either; the steam rising from the mug had begun to fog up his glasses. He took them off to wipe the lenses. Niou's face blurred. "And with greater self-control?"

"Shouldn't I be the one asking you that?"

No, there would be no small talk, not with Niou. There was no purposelessness in the Niou-kun that Hiroshi remembered, no ambiguity of vision, no attachments to people for the sake of attachment itself. _But you meant something to me, and I thought I meant something to you._ "Will I be seeing you again?" he asked, cutting to the direct question.

A faint rise and descent of the shoulders. "Lend me your mobile for a minute."

In the end, Niou never drank the coffee.


End file.
